Disclaimer: FMA is not mine.
1) Mei Chang never, in her thirteen years of existence, expected to leave her beloved country. Ever. She loved the Chang province of Xing with all her heart (and she had a big heart, for such a little girl), loved the way the cool air of the mountain terraces where the Chang clan lived slid across her skin in the early morning, loved the sound of the seasonal rain pounding on the thin rooftops, loved the smiles she saw when the villagers nearby saw their Little Princess racing down and through their rice paddies, careful not to crush any of the precious young shoots, panda on her shoulder, smile on her face. She loved the smell of steaming rice and the taste of the moon cakes her mother sometimes- rarely- almost never- managed to procure for their table. She loved Xing. It was because she loved her country so much that she had to leave it, because she loved the people of her country even more. And to help her people, who were weak and small and hungry, the weakest and smallest and hungriest in all the empire, she would do anything. Even leave them behind, if that was what she needed to do to prove to all of Xing (and to the depths of her rather big heart) that the Chang clan was every bit as important as any of the other clans. That the Chang princess could make the emperor proud, too.
So she left. In the middle of the night, because good-byes would only make her cry harder, and she was crying rivers already, more tears than physically possible for such a small, smiley girl. She ran away, down through the rice paddies where the shoots were now tall and strong, with only the moon to smile at the Little Princess, running away with a panda on her shoulder and tears on her face.
She swore she would be back, someday, and she would save the Chang people. If it killed her.
2) Only, really, she never expected it to kill her. She fully expected to come back victorious, expected to become the next Empress of Xing, the savior of the Chang clan. Because anything else, well, anything else would be utterly unimaginable, and she had a pretty good imagination (it had the power to transform the bean-man into an actual, attractive human being, after all, though that was later, much later). She had to succeed.
3) But Mei Chang never, ever, expected that crossing the desert would be that difficult, and the desert was only the start of her journey. She was a princess, she was an alchemist, she had her panda by her side and as much food and water as she could carry (which was a lot. She was a martial artists as well as an alchemist, pray recall). What could possibly go wrong?
She hadn't bargained on how hot deserts could be, or how dry, or how big, or how every cactus and sand dune looked so very alike, making it oh so easy to get lost, or exactly how much water little Xiao Mei could drink in one go.
How she miscalculated that last one was entirely beyond her.
(She didn't even want to think about how she would get back across the desert to get home.)
4) Mei Chang never expected that Xiao Mei would someday find someone who could rank higher up in the pyramid of life than the princess or the panda. She also never expected that beings existed who could rank even lower than protists and amoeba. Then again, when she thought that, she didn't know that little rice-grain men existed, and she wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen him it with her own two eyes.
5) Mei Chang fully expected to fall in love, someday, but she never really thought about what would happen if she fell in love with the wrong person. She never expected to have her heart broken by a little loudmouth rice-grain man.
6) And she never expected to have the pieces put back together by said rice-grain man's little younger brother.
7) Mei Chang never expected to form a bond with the dogs of the Yao clan, to realize that she might have something in common with them besides half of her bloodline. But maybe she had been a bit too quick to judge them by the rumors that preceded them and by their fancy weapons (obviously the sign of Father's the Emperor's favor, favor she never once had, love and respect she never once felt. Her brother even had a bodyguard for heaven's sake. He was important enough to warrant assassination attempts, and she? She was nothing, to their father. Small and weak and worthless. And that stung.). Maybe all of them, puppy-dog-eyed bodyguard, stupid, squinty-eyed brother, and little Mei Chang herself were really pieced together from the same fabric. Cut off your arm for your young master, sell your soul to evil homunculi for your country, travel across the desert, across a foreign country, across the Arctic Circle, in the company of an Ishvalan terrorist and a corrupt ex-official to save your clan... maybe they weren't all that different after all. Maybe she could respect them.
At the very least, she found, she could let the Yao dogs live. Especially when the scary doctor with the terrible bedtime stories and haunted eyes was glaring at her like that.
8) Mei had fully expected to get a loyal knight in shining armor. After all, she was a royal princess of the Xing Empire, wasn't she? But even she never expected to get a loyal knight who was shining armor.
9) Mei never expected to have the proof of immortality- the one thing that could save her dying clan- in her own two hands and to toss it away to fight in a war that was not her own, for a people and a country she owed nothing to. Well, maybe that was a lie. She owed a lot to the country that he lived in and loved and fought for, because she owed a lot to him. Her newly healed heart, for starters.
Then again, Amestris had also spawned the midget who had broken it to pieces in the first place.
But that was irrelevant.
10) Mei Chang never expected that the first time she saw the love of her life (or, his physical body at least), he would be so thin, or so sickly, or have such long, unkempt hair. And she never expected that she would not care about those kinds of things, that she would willingly throw herself into his stick-like arms and wail her worries away on his skeletal chest. That he would hold her gently, too weakly to be tight, too tightly to be weak, and whisper thank you, I'm so sorry I worried you, can you ever forgive me? in her ear, and that those words and that voice would mean more than the weakness in his limbs, that the steady thump of his heart that would mean more to her than the blue of his eyes or gold of his hair, that his big bright smile and gentle warmth would more than make up for the state of his muscles. She had learned that it was the soul in the armor that mattered most of all, and that hadn't changed at all, human body or not.
Thank God. Or Truth. Or One, or All, or whatever. Al never did manage to explain all that satisfactorily to her, though in his defense, he tried for years.
Just like she tried (and failed) to explain the whoosh inside the earth, the power beneath the rocks and dirt they stepped on, that made up her art of retanjutsu.
11) Mei may have come to respect the Yaos, but she never expected to lose to them, never expected that her squinty-eyed brother would rise to the throne instead of her. And it hurt, losing to him, knowing that she had failed her family.
So imagine her surprise when the same squinty-eyed brother offered to take her clan under his wing, to ensure the survival and wellbeing of the Changs. Maybe he wasn't as bad as she thought.
But she never imagined being in debt to the Yaos, or feeling anything but animosity and jealousy towards any of her half-siblings. Still, she's kinda glad that she got to know her elder brother. Even if he is terribly annoying sometimes. Greedy pig. (did he have to offer the same privileges to all their siblings? At the very least, she's still his favorite sister, right? Right?)
12) She never expected to turn her back on the boy she knew she loved to trek back across the giant desert to Xing, never expected to ride off into the sunrise alone. Well, not alone, there was the Yao dog-bodyguard, and that squinty-eyed, greedy excuse for a half-brother, and of course Xiao Mei was with her, but Mei Chang might as well have been alone. Because Al wasn't coming, couldn't come. And she couldn't ask him to, not when he needed to recuperate and recover. Not when he wanted so desperately to go home. His home, not hers.
She never expected that she wouldn't be rejoicing at the thought of going back home to Xing. But the word home rang so hollow when it was only hers, not his, not theirs. But still. She needed to do this, needed to go back to Xing- where she belonged, where he didn't- for the Chang clan. For her family.
She never expected that a time would come when she would want to do something for herself, not for the good of the Clan. And that those two loves of hers – her family, and her Al- would hurt so much inside her heart, and wring it to shreds as she fought fiercely against tears.
She never expected to lose that battle, either.
13) Mei Chang honestly never expected to see him ever again. Sure, they wrote each other sometimes, even if letters took weeks and sometimes months to criss-cross the desert, and she did invite him (frequently) to come to Xing to learn retanjutsu (from someone besides her, someone who could explain the power that flows in the earth, dissect the "science" of it, as Al had put it, thought Mei still didn't understand- and never would- how her art could be confined into the harsh rules of a science), but she never expected him to really come, an expectation that had been justified by the two long, frantic, bustling, hectic, boring years that passed without his face or his smile or his voice, just his stoic round handwriting, inksplashes on white paper. Not nearly enough.
14) And when he did come, she never expected to burst into tears at the sight of him, taller and clean-cut and strong and healthy and just so perfect, the way she had always imagined he must have been, and every bit as gentle as she remembered. Her imagination, strong as it was, wasn't strong enough to fathom the depth of Al's kindness, and seeing him in the flesh for the first time in two years was just too much.
15) Mei never expected the Emperor, of all people, would try to play matchmaker for her, and that he would be ever so bad at it. Ling kept dropping not-so-subtle hints at council meetings about her and the Amestrian alchemist, seating the two together at every single event and state dinner, and orchestrating "chance" meetings at every possible opportunity. Not that she was complaining, mind, but she hoped the Emperor wasn't this blatantly obvious in all his supposedly secret state dealings.
At least four times a week, she happened to "bump into" Al in the restaurant she ate lunch in every day when she happened to be in the capital (which was quite frequently now, more frequently than ever before. For some strange reason, brother Ling insisted on keeping his retanjutsu advisor near the palace... where Al just happened to be staying… as if the Emperor suddenly had a strange craving to understand the alchemical arts of Xing and Amestris… which he had never shown any proficiency or even interest in at all before… and still didn't show much interest in, truth to be told…). At least six times a week, the two would meet coincidentally in the mountainside she meditated in every morning because it reminded her of her ancestral lands to the north, or in the bamboo groves where she practiced her martial arts every afternoon with Xiao Mei. Every time, Al claimed that he had come out from the palace to take a breath of fresh air at Ling's insistence, and that Ling had given him a suggestion of a place to see while in Xing. Any more breaths of fresh air, and Al would choke on them.
But she just rolled her eyes, smiled a little, and mouthed a silent thank you to Lan Fan. Mei couldn't see the black shadow that was the Emperor's most trusted advisor and bodyguard, but she knew all the same that Lan Fan lurking around the corner, on the roof, waiting to give a favorable report to the emperor.
Mei knew her sister-in-law caught her thanks and transmitted it dutifully to Ling.
16) Mei never expected that she would have to explain to her fiancé that of course Xiao Mei was going to be the maid of honor, how could the panda not be her maid of honor, Xiao Mei was practically her little sister. And yes, maybe the little rice-grain man would have to march down the aisle with a panda wearing a modified Amestrian gown on his shoulder, and maybe Edward would look absolutely ridiculous doing it (not that he didn't already in his ceremonial Xingese robes borrowed from Ling who was presiding over the ceremony, though Mei couldn't exactly tell Al that) but Edward wasn't the one getting married, and he could just deal with it.
She fully expected Xiao Mei to give the little rice-grain man a piece of her mind, and so was not duly surprised when the panda bit three of Edward's fingers almost clean off, and his wife, massively pregnant with their second child, had to perform emergency surgery to give Ed automail fingers right there in the middle of the ceremony. Strangely, Winry didn't seem terribly saddened, or the least bit concerned, about her husband's injury; in fact, she seemed really enthusiastic (almost to the point of insanity, though no one dared point that out, for fear of the deadly projecti- I mean, wrench, she was twirling around deftly) about Ed's new prosthetics.
In summary: Mei had an eventful, beautiful wedding, a wonderful mixture of Xingese and Amestrian traditions, with a sprinkle of the unexpected that was all hers and Al's. What more could she ask for?
17) Mei never expected to not live the rest of her life in the Chang mountains in Xing, never expected to migrate between Resembool and Central in the summer, the Chang family lands in the winter, and travel throughout Xing at the Emperor's discretion for the rest of the year. But she did, and she found that she loved Xing, all of Xing, not just the little bit that she had known and grown up in, and that she loved Al's Amestris, too. Though, really, there was nothing like racing up the rice terraces hand-in-hand with a laughing Al, panda on her shoulder and smile on her face, careful not to crush the tender young shoots of rice. And when she came home, her home, their home, (but the whole world was their home now, it seemed like) she always came bearing moon cakes for the tables.
18) She never expected to name her first-born son Hohenheim. For heaven's sake, Hohenheim? But Al had just looked at her with those great big blue eyes of his and how could she say no? But she called her baby by his middle name, Longwei, Great Dragon, which was much nicer sounding than Hohenheim. Hohenheim Longwei Chang-Elric. She hoped her son would carve a future for himself as Longwei, as a great dragon of the East and West, not as a second Hohenheim. She'd never wish her father-in-law's fate on her child, on any child, even Ling's son Fuu or the rice-grain man's Maes, no matter what Al said about dying peacefully and living fully and loving entirely. Never.
She was much happier with naming their twin daughters Nina and Trisha, though when she sang them to sleep, she still called them by their middle names, Lin-Lan(Jade Orchid, a beautiful name… and a nod both to her half-brother, who had been dropping hints that he thought he deserved a namesake, and to his long-suffering but quite happy wife)and Xifeng(Western Phoenix, which Mei thought was a beautiful way to combine Al's heritage with her own. Afterall, the phoenix was the symbol of the Xing Empire, and Amestris was the West, and their daughter, all their children, was born of both.)
19) But she never expected that Xiao Mei would feel jealous of all the babies, all the attention Mei was showering elsewhere, and so to appease her younger sister, she had named their last child, a beautiful boy, after the panda. He was the only one of Mei's children to have a Xingese first name: Xiao Xiong, Little Bear. Al absolutely butchered the pronunciation, and, strangely, she loved her husband all the more for it, though she never let him know that. She let him off the hook easy and let him call the kid Eddie. She never expected to name one of her children after the little rice-grain man, but, well, if she could name her elder son Hohenheim, and one of her precious daughters after her squinty-eyed half-brother, how could she say not to Al's wish to name his last child after his elder brother?
Needless to say, Xiao Mei had found someone to join Al at the top of the pyramid of life. Four little someones, to be precise.
20) Most of all, Mei never expected to be content with so many unexpected happenings in her life. She was the kind of girl who dreamed about a storybook ending, and what she had gotten was nothing like her dreams at all. But dreams or no dreams, she still got her happily ever after, and that's what mattered the most, right?